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In his new book Steven Pinker, psychologist at Harvard University, sets out to fundamentally alter our understanding of the trajectory of violence from pre-historic times to the present. He takes issue with the widely held perception that the most recent past, the 20th century, was an age of large-scale bloodshed and genocidal slaughter.
‘He was one of the best National Socialists, one of the strongest defenders of the German Reich, one of the greatest opponents of all enemies of the Empire.
Anybody remotely involved in ‘Churchill Studies’ or even interested in the great man to the extent of reading books by him or on him must have encountered references in the footnotes to the considerable amount of written material which he left. A large part is now deposited at the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge – and available to the public.
Rachel Duffett has written a fine social history of British rank and file soldiers, or rankers, and their experiences of food during the Great War. She states, ‘The ranker’s relationship with food was a constant thread, woven throughout his army experience … every day, wherever he was, a man needed to eat’ (p. 229).
People must eat, even during wartime, preferably three times a day, civilians and soldiers, and of course children.
A new book has entered international debates on German soldiers and war crimes with a vengeance: Soldaten, heralded by the German political magazine Der Spiegel (as the dust jacket states) as ‘nothing short of a sensation … The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces [were] not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war.
In this fine monograph, based almost entirely on his PhD thesis, David Monger assesses the propaganda activities of the National War Aims Committee (NWAC) during the First World War, a focus which has already been supplemented by a number of journal articles in the last few years, relating to propaganda, and civilian and servicemen's morale during this period.
‘It is astonishing’, states Panikos Panayi in the opening sentence of his monograph, ‘that almost a century after the outbreak of the First World War, no academic study has yet appeared upon the experiences of German prisoners of war in Britain’ (p. 1).
Clive Emsley’s project seeks to frame the intersection of crime and military service in multiple ways and contexts. These include the relationship between wartime service and offending; the comparison of military and civilian crime rates in both war and peacetime; and the changing perceptions of soldiers held by Britons in the 20th century.
This review was written in early June, and coincided with the anniversary of D-Day. The annual commemoration of this event, accompanied this year by new television documentaries as well as the replaying of iconic films, is yet another reminder of the important place the Second World War still occupies in British culture as well as history.